ABC: Tonight at 8:00est

God bless sweeps month.

100% of Americans can believe whatever they want. That doesn't make them right.

Very safe, non-controversial show.

It was simply a rehash of everything that has been discussed on this topic since...forever. Look, there are things that are unidentified and some of them fly. The naysayers are soooooo concerned with repudiating false reports of alien craft that they miss the opportunity to explore things that are unknown be it in our atmosphere, the local neighborhood of space, or even interdimensional phenomena. Who knows ? If all 'legitimate' researchers are scared off by being labeled kooks for pursuing unusual lines of investigation than it will be left exclusively to hacks, quacks, and charlatans

Whatever. Just because some dumb shmuck doesn't know the underside of a goose or a meteor shower when he sees it doesn't mean there's some great mystery to be solved.

The scientific community would go hog wild if there was something real to be discovered, count on it. "I saw something and I don't know what it is" doesn't cut it.

BS. How long did it take the scientific community to accept ball lightning? Scientists are notorious about not accepting data that doesn't fit their worldview.

Accept it or come up with a model to explain it? Papers on the subject have been published for years. Here's a list. I don't know if it's complete or not.

http://www.fis.unipr.it/~albino/docu...grafia_BL.html

And the phenomena has been known for centuries. It used to be called St Elmo's Fire. It's only relatively recently, in the last few decades, that anyone has bothered even looking into it.

It's what Charles Fort called "damned data," stuff that is written off as patently impossible without being investigated at all. Your attitude to UFOs is a perfect example. You automatically write it off, even though there is no way that you can, in all intellectual honesty, dismiss that the phenomena, in some cases (no matter how few) might actually be something extraordinary. Even if 98% can be explained away, two percent of cases that have no explanation is tantalizing.

I have no reason at all to assume amazing explanations when the mundane is more likely. I have no doubt people see things they can't explain. That doesn't lead me to believe the explanation is amazing, it leads me to believe the explanation is mundane but unknown to the observer.

In the 19th century scientists dismissed meteors because rocks falling from space was too amazing an explanation.

Science never expands if you insist on thinking you have all the answers. Rare and amazing aren't the same thing, and things that were amazing 50 years ago are obvious and commonplace today.

I won't trust any data that isn't presented to me in a purchasable flow-chart form.

Yeah, well you can't trust those damned peasants. That's why tales of rocks falling from the sky were dismissed. Luckily, things don't work that way anymore. Nowadays it doesn't matter who you are, as long as you have some sort of proof.

There's no proof. Not even any real evidence. "I don't know" isn't evidence. Don't misunderstand me, I'm all for believing in weird atmospheric effects or what have you, things that have mundane but currently unknown explanations, even if it's more likely the explanation is known. It's the insistence on magical explanations like angels or aliens that get my goat.

What books have you been reading?

I think UFO's are boring, but it's true, science really has trouble accepting things that alter accepted paradigms. I think it's getting worse with increased specializtion, and the corporatization of academic culture.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if aliens were non-obtrusively observing us; letting the entire planet progress naturally would be a model experiment.

I'm surprised you didn't mentioned that doctors took a long time to accept the idea of germs and anastetic before surgury (not sure if I spelled that right, it just it took a while to prove that one could stop pain before surgury).

Oh, what is ball lighting?

Science doesn't do anything. Science is a method of observation and analysis, not an organization.

The corporatization of academia is another thing altogether. People invent yet another baldness cure or whatever because that's what other people are willing to pay to have researched. It's a damn shame more people aren't interested in paying for useful research rather than profitable research.

Your talking about: Incommensurable Paradigms.

Science is a philosophy, and practitioners of the scientific philosophy — diverse as they are — have an institutional culture. But it's true that science doesn't do damn thing. I should have said "scientists."

Don't get me started.

UFO doesn't have to mean "alien" though. People have seen strange things in the sky for centuries - they only became alien spacecraft in the last 60 years or so. Then the whole "alien abduction" thing came up, and muddied the waters. In times past, that would have been explained as a succubus or similar supernatural creature. Today, people instinctively draw a line to UFOs, and assume extra-terrestrials are involved.

But if you ignore the cultural interpretations that are placed on these things, if you strip away the "aliens are here" veneer, there's still a number (a very small number, admittedly) of cases of strange objects or phenomena that don't fit into your neat "I saw something and don't know what it was" criteria.

It's a mystery. And science should be driven by mystery. That this mystery is written off as hogwash just because of the superstitions that have sprung up around it is a real shame.

Also, I'm shunting this thread to Culture as it has dick all to do with politics.

Yeah, I'm aware that UFO and Alien Spacecraft have become synonymous. I'm also aware that once upon a time the same phenomena (meteor showers, sundogs, and sleep paralysis experiences spring to mind) had religious connotations attached to them.

The thing is, I say both things were done for the same reason, and 'I can't explain it' is that reason. I didn't know what it was, it's out of my experience, so it must be caused by a higher power. Creating a god of the gaps is human nature. We expect both cause and effect to be readily apparent. When it's not, we end up saying, in some form or another, "It's a miracle".

I don't think mysteries are always written off as hogwash. Medical mysteries aren't. Remission in cancer patients or spontaneous recovery of coma patients aren't always understood, but I doubt medical researchers just shrug their shoulders and say "Beats me!"

I'd love to know what these few objects and phenomena you mentioned are. I can't thing of a single thing that can't be attributed to either natural occurances, psychological traits, myths, or just plain misremembered, misunderstood, or exagerrated normal events.

I want to believe.


This universe wouldn't be very exciting if we were the only ones here. What a waste of space.

I do too, but the evidence rigth now seems pretty lack-luster. I probably won't believe aliens exist till one slaps me in the face. That's the way I am, I'm a very stubborn person when it comes to stuff like this.

I saw a program once where they debunked the hell out of the Mexico City video...can't remember what station it was on, but they did a fairly good job of showing flaws in the video. Not to say the actual event didn't occur, but I'm skeptical of the video.

There's nothing wrong with being skeptical.

I could call it evidence, sure. I'd be wrong, but I could call it evidence.

I don't think things clearly can't be explained because some guy on TV says "they clearly can't be explained". You just can't do it, so you assume it can't be done. Yawn.

Videos from Mexico City? Are you talking about this? Or the remarkable sight of Venus miraculously becoming visible during a solar eclipse in 1991 and being videotaped by someone with a not-too-steady hand?

The whole "institutional culture" thing doesn't wash. Sure, there is a scientific community that tends to be very suspicious of wild claims, for good reasons. But there are also always plenty of maverick scientists out there who can't stop themselves from digging around in areas where there appear to be interesting discrepencies. That's practically the definition of a scientist. If they come up with something genuinely interesting and hard to ignore, the scientific community will pay attention. Heinrich Schliemann was eventually taken seriously because he was a real scientist. Ditto Alfred Kinsey. Whatever institutional barriers there are will eventually drop in the face of reasonable, impassioned argument.

No one is presenting such arguments. If the data were there, someone would be arguing it in a scientifically valid way instead of making jillions by stocking the New Age section of the bookstore.